Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Way Back When, 1947 version

I posted a year and half ago about this 1900 yachting misadventure. Well I came across a series of yachting disasters in the September 1947 issue of Yachting magazine. I reprint the paragraph verbatim.
"Two high school boys tried the 80 mile crossing from Muskegon to Milwaukee in an 18' outboard. They were picked up by an ore boat nearly swamped in high seas, 18 miles out of Milwaukee.... A man sleeping in a rubber life raft atop a power cruiser disappeared in a passage from Chicago to Saugatuck.... Eleven outboard powered life rafts tried an experimental crossing from Sheyboygan to Ludington for the Army and took a terrible beating in high seas and cold for 18 hours. Four finished, the others were picked up or turned back. A Madison St. transient, changing his shirt on the Chicago River bank in a semi-comatose condition, suddenly found himself cruising on a log hollering bloody murder.
And to paraphrase Walter Cronkite, "And that's the way it (is)was!"

2 comments:

  1. The sea is perilous.
    "Sea" being a general term for waters larger than a bathtub.

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  2. I don't think I have ever come across so much yachting misfortune rolled into one short paragraph.

    ReplyDelete